Charcoal filtering at home

I have a question. Say I have a bottle of bourbon, or scotch, that seems too congeneric in taste. Recently I bought a McClelland's Islay which I believe is young Bowmore whiskey. It seemed quite feisty (I wonder if "feinty" is etymologically related!), not from the peat, but from the inherent distillery character. Is there any reason I cannot buy activated charcoal and dump some in the bottle, leave it for a few days, and see what happens when it settles down? Where can I get small quantities of such a thing and how much should I add? (Teaspoon, tablespoon, half-cup?). I would like to experiment to see if I can reduce the rough edges. While most bourbons are pretty clean today, I might want to try this with one of the younger bourbons that are available. Any comments/suggestions are appreciated.

Re: Charcoal filtering at home

Thanks Tim, I have run across this site before when web searching various distillation issues, but did not think of it with regard to my question. I looked at the polishing section per your suggestion and it gave me ideas how to filter commercial (purchased) whiskey. Amazing the extent to which people have thought through these problems.

Re: Charcoal filtering at home

Just to give an opinion: if it were me, I'd buy the cheapest Brita
filter at the store, slice it open to extract the carbon, wash the
carbon with water to get the dust out and to wet it a bit, then
toss about a half a cup into a bottle for a few hours... oh, and be sure
to keep a "control sample" with no carbon in order to see if it's
working.

Re: Charcoal filtering at home

Re: Charcoal filtering at home

I've got a bag of Barrel char from BT that I had intended to use in my smoke cooker. However, your post got me to thinking, perhaps I can use if for a similar purpose. I'm going to dump some char into some MM and age it for a few years.